


Fear Not

by di0brando



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Blood and Injury, Dark Will Graham, Established Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter, M/M, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, Post-Fall (Hannibal), Protective Hannibal Lecter, Will and Hannibal face the potential of having their cover blown, Years Later, Yes they have a dog
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-31
Updated: 2020-03-31
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:42:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23407750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/di0brando/pseuds/di0brando
Summary: "Hannibal inhales sharply through his nose; the muscles in his legs tighten, his posture coiled and ready to move, though a sullen look from Will asks him to remain still. Will is noticeably prodded from behind, and another figure comes into view as he passes the wall blocking the entryway."Or, Hannibal's hands are clammy with sweat and his heart races as domesticity threatens to dull his edges. Fear is a foreign and overwhelming feeling--one that he's kept under lock and key for many years.
Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 19
Kudos: 252





	Fear Not

Gulls cry, listless in the fair distance, and Hannibal would hear them even if the living room windows weren’t open. The curtains are thin enough to gather and flutter in the slight, salty breeze; Hannibal has long since gotten used to the smell of ocean water and drying seaweed, though when he and Will first moved in, he found himself irritated by the heavy scents and how they would overpower the mild pine in Will’s shampoo, and the mint in his own tea.

Their cottage is quaint, and it sits a mile away from a pebbled path that leads to a paved road. From there, it is even miles farther from the nearest settlement—a village of fishermen and humble artists that have sequestered themselves away from the world for one reason or another. Not all are well-mannered by definition, but there’s an unspoken understanding among them, and Hannibal could not have hoped for such a thing when he and Will were living on the run. The townsfolk all like one another well enough, and would probably go so far as to shoo away nosy outsiders just for the sake of doing so. Will has surmised that at least some of them are running from something, albeit perhaps not the FBI.

Will is quietly fond the bitter, anti-social people of the shore, and so Hannibal agrees that this area suits their ‘retirement’ just fine. Though Will has been using ‘retirement’ a bit too loosely. Hannibal isn’t necessarily shamed by his current age, but the word implies that he’s growing indolent in his dotage—that he’s no longer eating pigs with two legs, and that he’s giving up the hunt entirely in favor of publishing his anonymous poetry.

It’s not as if he’s out of options, as there are plenty of tourists and lost fishermen that stumble into town and thus into Hannibal’s good graces. They’re almost always insufferable, and they’re certainly never missed once the rest of the village forgets their faces. If their wayward boats are pushed back out to sea and their organs are carefully salvaged for Hannibal to freeze, then it’s not anyone’s concern.

Hannibal understands himself; however, and he’s clever enough to recognize that he has in fact slowed down over the years. He could blame it on a number of things. He’s had a bad leg ever since he and Will fell from Dolarhyde’s cliff. His vision is blurred sometimes, though he feels that the change doesn’t necessitate a pair of glasses. He has hints of arthritis in his hands, for they’ve been tried and tested ever since he became a surgeon. Of course, these all add up to be trivial factors, and Hannibal also knows that Will would blame the new turn on something else entirely: the nature of domesticity itself.

Domesticity.

Hannibal’s shelves filled with poetry written in other languages. Will’s little hut out back filled with fishing gear, and the table under the bay window used for crafting lures. Hannibal’s set of fine china stored in a display, never to be deliberately broken for whimsy’s sake. Will’s humble collection of movies and records, kept in organized boxes beneath the analog television set. A well-used kitchen and well-loved bed. The beach and private dock that are only a four minute walk from their front porch. It’s bliss; Hannibal has come a long way from an ostentatious foyer and the need to fill his life with preening performance. Physically and aesthetically, it is much emptier, but Hannibal feels full for the first time in ages.

Will’s dog—their dog, Shiloh—is barking on and off beyond the cottage. The background noise affirms Hannibal’s assumption that Will is coming back from one of his walks along the shoreline. Hannibal briefly looks up from his current novel and takes an appreciative sip of his tea. He inhales notes of hibiscus and pomegranate and savors them.

The afternoon is now heavy with orange light. Hannibal will have to start preparing dinner within the next few hours. They’ll probably be eating some of the fish that Will caught, as they’re running low on pork. Rosemary and potatoes will probably be on the menu as well. Hannibal lets a tooth catch on his lower lip—unfortunately he’s going to have to keep dessert basic. They're going to have to make a trip to the market soon.

Suddenly, it becomes apparent that both the dunes and the cottage have become quiet and still. Hannibal is lost in thought until he isn’t. Perhaps domesticity _has_ hooked its claws in him and made him less capable, less aware, for the lack of ambiance is unusual and therefore somewhat alarming. Hannibal’s lifts his head, not unlike a lion, and sets his book and teacup to the side. He rises from his armchair and looks out the bay window only to find nothing of interest.

A few seconds tick by slowly before the front door swings open with a mild creak. Their dog normally leads, but now he is nowhere to be seen, and Will crosses the threshold, his hands held above his shoulders in a tense surrender. Hannibal inhales sharply through his nose; the muscles in his legs tighten, his posture coiled and ready to move, though a sullen look from Will asks him to remain still.

Will is noticeably prodded from behind, and another figure comes into view as he passes the wall blocking the entryway. It’s a male—shorter than Will, though he has thicker muscle packed in his arms and torso. He’s somewhat unkempt, with uneven stubble and shadows under his eyes, and Hannibal notes that his movements are not aligned with those trained in proper law enforcement. The stranger is stiffly holding a pistol to the small of Will’s back, and his eyes come to focus on Hannibal.

“Not a word,” the stranger instructs, his voice carrying the bare traces of an English accent. “I’ve seen the two of you in town, certainly did think you looked familiar.”

Hannibal’s eyes flicker to meet Will’s. Will gives him a minute shake of his head, not to be registered by anyone other than Hannibal. Their guest isn’t an investigator, then. But if he’s called the authorities, their house won’t have a shortage of investigators within the next few hours. Will’s index finger twitches so as to continue the nonverbal conversation. ‘No one else here,’ his hand seems to say. Hannibal straightens somewhat at the realization that this man wouldn’t be here if authorities had been contacted. They would have been swarmed; they wouldn’t have been subjected to amateur vigilantism.

Hannibal isn’t sure if this stunt is the result of drunken impulsiveness from the previous night or if the man truly believes that this is the proper, heroic course of action that will get him a fat reward from the FBI. Either way, this does nothing but benefit the killers in hiding.

“Get on your knees,” the stranger instructs, once again shoving the business end of his pistol into Will’s back. Will’s eye twitches with annoyance but he complies and sinks downward, his knees coming to rest on the floor. Hannibal’s brow creases tightly, his breathing shallow and his teeth set on edge.

“Hannibal the cannibal. Right?” The stranger huffs incredulously. “Dead or alive is what I read, but alive seems to be the overwhelming preference. Not so much for this one here,” he gestures lazily at Will. “Thought I’d be jumping the gun a bit, but the police can’t seem to take you both on. Seems I’d be a fool to try to grab you both myself.”

Hannibal’s throat clicks dry. Will’s expression hardens into something contradictory and dark—apologetic yet unforgiving. A reward will be granted even if both of them don’t end up in the BSHCI.

The light streaming in from the kitchen windows turns Will’s fly-away curls into a halo. There’s the mechanical sound of the pistol’s hammer, the tug of the scar in Will’s cheek as he opens his mouth; the numinous glint from his glasses and the way his hoarse voice utters a single, “Hannibal.”

Hannibal’s vision floods red when the shot pops off, ringing through the living room and the kitchen just before Hannibal lunges, aiming low and hitting hard—it takes him no time at all to kick back the foyer rug and cross the space between himself and their intruder. Will’s body topples in his peripheral, but Hannibal can’t afford another misstep, so he doesn't look back.

The stranger fires the pistol again when Hannibal knocks them both to the kitchen floor, but it misses in a wide shot. Hannibal snarls and he and his opponent writhe and scramble on the paneling, fighting for a proper hold of forearms or throats. Hannibal twists and finds his teeth clamping down tight around the man’s wrist in a viper’s hold. The stranger drops the gun, so Hannibal’s confidence is bolstered; he feels tendons shift between his teeth but his jaw tightens and tightens until there’s screaming and ringing in his ears and a familiar, metallic taste floods his mouth. The blood flows in rivulets beyond Hannibal’s chin and he has to swallow to keep from choking on the sheer volume of it.

There’s howling and thrashing, and Hannibal feels neither the knee in his stomach nor the hand pulling violently at his hair. He only relinquishes when his opponent fights smarter instead of harder and angles his free hand towards Hannibal’s eye. Hannibal rears back with a hiss and the intruder kicks back, sliding along the floor until his back is pressed against the kitchen cabinets, groaning in the corner. A weird little ghost whose framing vaguely resembles the shrunken Garret Jacob Hobbs in Hannibal’s memory palace.

Hannibal’s teeth surely nicked an artery; blood is vacating that arm at a rapid rate, but the pig is still moving and squealing, so Hannibal lunges forward again. He gets a hard kick to his nose for the trouble, and he feels more than hears a gross crack, but the broken cartilage only deters him for as long as it takes to shake the loose hair away from his eyes. Hannibal doesn’t register yanking the knife block off of the island. He has a tight hold of a butcher’s blade and the others fall from their holsters, clattering to the floor.

When Hannibal strikes, the stranger throws up his good hand to block the blow, but he only succeeds in losing two fingers to Hannibal’s swing. There’s more screaming, but it’s nothing in comparison to the pained stress building up and escaping past Hannibal’s tight throat and grinding teeth. Hannibal only hears and feels white noise. It’s as if the beach itself has swallowed him, grinding him up in the sand. It urges him to open his ribs, accept the curtain call, and take the salt water into his lungs. Let them fill up heavy without Will there to keep him from submitting.

Two remaining fingers and a thumb grab for one of the scattered knives—the intruder gets a tomato knife straight through the meat of Hannibal’s bicep, but Hannibal kills dragons when it suits him, and the defense amounts to nothing. Woeful vigilantism will continue to amount to nothing today, and Hannibal just needs the pig to submit to that conclusion.

With as much force as he can manage, Hannibal shoves his knife into the man’s chest and leaves it there. There’s finally the beginning of a death rattle, and so Hannibal crouches, back arched and eyes narrowed. He looms over the heaving and the twitching and he wants to watch the body shut down but he finds himself unable to see anything.

Blind and dumb, Hannibal twists vaguely, moving in the direction of the foyer, but his legs are stiff. There’s a vice grip around his lungs, and his knees buckle so badly that he can’t stand.

“Hannibal.”

Hannibal winces, curling forward and hissing through his teeth in pain.

“Hannibal! Hannibal, look at me.”

Hannibal blinks hard; he has to blink a few more times to clear away the stinging and regain his blurry vision.

And there is Will—angelic and cradled by the evening’s golden light, his face flushed red and his eyes filled with the worry that doubles as a mirror image of Hannibal’s own distress. Will—his darling Will—looks concerned and patient, and most importantly he doesn’t look wounded.

“Are you alright?” Will frames the sides of Hannibal’s face with his hands, gentle as he tilts his own head to look at the knife still lodged in Hannibal’s arm. Hannibal inhales shakily, and Will’s scent confirms that he isn’t bleeding. He’s alive and utterly free of new, open bullet holes.

“I didn’t...” It shames Hannibal to admit that he hadn’t properly seen whether or not the initial shot hit Will at all, and that it barely took two seconds for him to drown in rage instead of the proper methodology. Hannibal doesn’t continue his sentence due to the embarrassment he feels and the lingering feeling of a phantom hand clamped around his throat. He’s coming back to his own body in fits and starts, only now registering that warm tears are dripping from his chin, mingling with the blood.

“You’re shaking,” Will observes, something like awe in his voice, as he knows Hannibal's never been one to succumb to adrenaline. Like a machine in that regard, he’s always been able to keep a tight leash on his reactions, knowing that he can’t afford to ruin a hunt with poor physicality.

Yet here he is, trembling like a leaf, though still not due to adrenaline. The realization passes over Will’s face—Hannibal watches it happen—and Hannibal turns his head away with a pompous, prideful sniff.

“...You were scared,” Will says. His tone is neutral, but the words themselves are clearly a revelation for Will. It’s a never-before-seen delivery from God’s hand. Both a miracle and a fluke that will never be witnessed by any human ever again, as the last person to see Hannibal experience _fear_ was his sister. Will pulls Hannibal closer and chuckles fondly; it’s affectionate enough to get Hannibal to take an even breath.

“You’re not _defective_ , Dr. Lecter. I’m terribly flattered. Honored even. And still,” Will drops his voice to a whisper and smiles, resting his forehead against Hannibal’s, “very much besotted.” Will closes the gap for a kiss, his lips catching the taste of the drying, red copper that lines Hannibal’s teeth.

When the kiss ends, Hannibal’s eyelids flutter, and he can feel Will’s thumbs wiping his cheeks clean of tears. His pupils dilate upon seeing the blood that's now stamped onto Will’s stubble and chapped lips. Will’s eyes look beyond Hannibal’s shoulder to the body slumped against the cabinets.

“It’s breathtaking,” Will confesses in a breath, “no photo could ever do it justice. No forethought, no architecture, just _compassion_. Energy. Poetry.”

“It’s unbecoming,” Hannibal protests, sounding almost petulant.

“It’s humbling. Raw. You’d have eaten straight from his ribs if I hadn’t anchored you.”

“I would have tended to your wounds—checked your pulse,” Hannibal corrects, the insinuation that he’d forgo Will for a vengeful blade hurts more than the knife in his arm.

“Well,” Will huffs, amused, “after that, of course.” Will then sighs and starts to get to his feet. He gently grabs Hannibal’s good arm and supports his lover around the waist. “Let’s get you to a chair. Do try to hang in there, dear, I’ll need a surgeon’s guidance for this one.”

Will successfully gets Hannibal to one of the chairs around the island, and Hannibal leans heavily against the counter top, feeling the early onset of fatigue.

“Where is Shiloh?” Hannibal asks, raising his voice as Will rummages in the hall closet for a towel.

“I tied his leash on a dune pole—felt something was wrong a minute before our guest arrived. Didn’t want him to get involved in any excitement.”

“You were confident from the beginning,” Hannibal says, trying not to make it sound as if for once he wasn’t up to snuff and prepared for any scenario.

“I felt him; it was nothing like a police infiltration, but in a way that made me more comfortable. I knew what we’d end up doing.” Will pauses for a second and looks over at Hannibal as he shuts the closet door.

“I...you were with me until you weren’t. It caught me off guard. You knew he was alone, I told you he was a nobody,” Will continues, referring to their earlier twitches and nods—the way they’ve always been able to communicate within their shared mind palace, “But then I tried to show you; tell you that I was going to duck under the gun, but it’s like someone cut the tape out of a Super 8.”

Hannibal doesn’t realize that his face has grown sour until Will really looks at him and barks out a surprised laugh. Hannibal pointedly doesn’t pout.

“Hannibal, it wasn’t anything you did wrong. I just think you should try a pair of glasses.”

“I have glasses,” Hannibal says immediately.

“Not reading glasses,” Will huffs, coming over and setting the towel on the counter. “We’re not getting any younger,” he chides. He tilts his head closer to Hannibal and inhales deeply, processing with smell the same way that Hannibal usually does. Hannibal appreciates the adopted tendency even when it's mostly used to placate him. “I want to preserve us until everyone else yields. If we have to make some changes then I’m more than willing.”

Something in Hannibal caves, but it doesn’t feel like admitting defeat. If anything, Will has cracked back another rib to reveal a hidden, tender part of Hannibal. Hannibal tilts his head back, closes his eyes, and nuzzles his cheek against the line of Will’s jaw, ignoring the fact that it makes his swollen nose throb.

“My darling boy, I’ll have to concede yet again.”

“To glasses, huh? How will we survive?”

“And you continue to mock me,” Hannibal chastises, nipping at Will’s chin with his teeth. Will laughs, the lines around his eyes creasing and the scar along his forehead pulling upward. Hannibal is a goner, and has been since Jack brought them both together.

“Why wouldn’t I when I’m the only one who can get away with it?” Will smirks, adjusting his own glasses. Then his expression falters slightly. “Will you be alright? I should go get Shiloh before the sun goes down, and this looks like it’ll...take a minute,” he says, nodding at Hannibal’s arm—no longer bleeding, but it’ll start up again when they pull the knife free. Hannibal waves a dismissive hand.

“That would be for the best. Shut him in the bedroom when you get my medical bag, we don’t need him getting dirty,” Hannibal glances briefly at the mess that is now the kitchen floor. Will nods and goes for the front door.

It’s silent in those few seconds; Hannibal gets to watch the faint, natural dust drift in front of the windows, illuminated by the waning sun. It occurs to him that today will probably inspire multiple pages of drawings and poems, and that he’s already filed Will’s openly loving and concerned touches away in his palace. He’s about to consider the knife wound when Will freezes at the door, his hand resting on the handle. He doesn’t look back at Hannibal.

“...Do you think we’ll have to move again?” He asks quietly, though he knows Hannibal can hear him perfectly from across the foyer. Hannibal considers this for a few seconds, looking up at the ceiling. It’s a heavy question, and one that will actually plant anxiety in Will’s gut if his lover isn’t careful. They’ve lived here for several years now, and Will’s become attached to their corner of the world. Hannibal knows that Will wouldn’t vocalize complaints about another move, but it would weigh on him very much indeed.

“...He is not from town, nor is he a recurring visitor.” Hannibal would have remembered him otherwise. “I truly don’t think he informed anyone of his plan. And the ‘Rippers’ haven’t been in newspapers in well over six months. Perhaps you could visit the market tomorrow morning and see if any heads turn. Doubtful, but I understand the concern.”

A few more seconds pass by in silence before Will nods resolutely at the door.

“I just didn’t want this chapter to end before I could finish reading it,” Will says easily, not sounding sad, but rather matter-o-fact. “That’s all.” He does turn back to give a wan yet sincere smile to Hannibal. “I’ll be back in a minute, alright? I’m not going anywhere.”

Hannibal closes his eyes and breathes in, peaceful, feeling the golden heat from the beach enter their house when Will leaves the door open in a yawn. The gulls have resumed their cacophony.

“I know,” Hannibal says, mostly to himself.

**Author's Note:**

> I just wanted to play with the concept of Hannibal not necessarily becoming soft or incapable, but rather unused to adaptations that have crept up on him before he really noticed. I liked the idea of him not being completely in control for once, and thus losing some control because of it. Also Will being his steady hand and loving guide is always A+ content for me. 
> 
> Kudos are super wonderful, but comments make my day!! Hope you liked this :3c


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